thinker | writer | maker
I Am Not Your Barbie
A New Play
May 2022 in Belgrade
A Solo Piece for Joana Knezevic
She's pink.
She's perky.
She's sweet.
She's salty.
She's Premium Plastic Perfection.
She's Barbie.
What are you going to do about it?
Part classical theatrical piece, part Eastern European performance art, with an appropriate splash of bubble gum pink dance party fabulousness, Not Your Baribe tackles the influence of Barbie dolls on the objectification of the female body in the Twenty-First Century.
Through pop beats, absurd hilarities, and roiling poetic monologues, this piece blazenly throws the spotlight onto ingrained discrimination against the female body within a twistedly patriarchal society, as well as the diversity that must be celebrated in order to reclaim it. It radically embraces the female body as an innate basic potential for change, not merely as a tool to raise the birth rate and give men pleasure.
Commissioned by powerhouse Serbian actress Joana Knezevic, galvanized by her own experience as a child with a cleft palate, this piece asks all of us to love ourselves as we truly are, without filters, photoshop, or plastic surgery.